Israel's election could be a turning point for the entire Middle East

Even in a region too used to conflict, there is an air of ominous apprehension sitting over the Middle East this weekend.

Sure, regional tensions are competing for our attention — and anxiety — with events in Ukraine, unrest across Europe, the perils of AI and financial market jitters.

But it is the sheer danger of regional instability embedded in Tuesday's elections in Israel, and the ongoing rumblings of renewed war with Iran, that have put people here on edge.

For a bitterly divided Israel, Tuesday's election is seen as an historic turning point for the country.

Benjamin Netanyahu has cast the election as a choice between standing up for Israel, or succumbing to international pressure for a Palestinian state (despite the fact that no one in this election is proposing the establishment of a Palestinian state).

His Likud Party's campaign slogan is "Yamin o Palestin", meaning "The Right Wing or Palestine".

But the thing to understand about this election is that it is not a choice between the far right and the left in classical terms. It feels to many Israelis more like a choice between the current state of play continuing, and the possibility of Israel going further to the right if Netanyahu were to stay in power.

For the anti-Netanyahu opposition, he is a threat to the state of Israel as a democracy. The ultra-right parties on which Netanyahu has relied have proposed changes that include allowing parliament to override Supreme Court decisions.

Then there are the territorial ambitions.

The ultranationalist national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has publicly promoted a plan to remove 1.86 million Palestinians — nearly 90 per cent of Gaza's population — over the next seven years. He and other far-right parties are calling it "voluntary" emigration, as well as "encouraging" the emigration of Palestinians from the West Bank.

Another far-right leader, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, says Israel should annex the 60 per cent plus of Gaza it already controls, as well as the 20 per cent of Lebanon it currently occupies.

Brutally, the fate of Palestinians is not an issue that features much in the election campaign. But the unanswered question of where these Palestinians are actually supposed to go shows a reckless disregard for the sort of instability such actions would have on the regional neighbours — Egypt, Jordan and Syria — that would be expected to take in millions of people.

But in a world where the idea of "Greater Israel" — documented this week by my ABC colleague Matthew Doran and our digital colleagues — has become mainstream, a more extreme biblical view of greater Israel would eventually include the entire Kingdom of Jordan as well as the Sinai Peninsula, most of Syria, and large swathes of Iraq, so the question of whether such a movement of people might provoke war with more Israeli neighbours, or actually destroy a poorer and less populous country like Jordan, doesn't get much of a mention.

International tensions

There is also a sense of the clock ticking on events that may unfold immediately after the election, whatever the outcome.

Hostilities between Iran and the US for now remain the loud rumbling background noise to the election, and in the region more broadly. There is a regular stream of stories about how Israel and/or the US is planning renewed attacks on Iran, and of Iran announcing it is changing its military posture from a defensive one to an offensive one.

For people living through it, there are the daily reports of the massing and preparation of US and Iranian troops, but also the knowledge that the defensive weapons that largely kept civilian populations safe are now in short supply.

The widespread damage to US bases across the region has seen US troops and assets moved en masse to Jordan.

There has been a change in the nature of attacks that have continued through the technical ceasefire. It is now civilian infrastructure — like Riyadh's airport — that has been targeted, rather than just military installations.

Iran has also threatened to escalate its attacks on countries throughout the region, and to infrastructure like data centres and underwater cables.

In Israel, though, all the attention is on the election. The campaign has been verbally violent, and its messages have often exploited violence.

A pundit on a conservative television channel who is seen as a Netanyahu mouthpiece this week called opposition party leader Gadi Eisenkot "a Moroccan monkey controlled by Ashkenazi elites", a reflection of some of the internal divides and racism in Israeli society.

Law enforcement agencies have been instructed to stop National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir from accompanying demolition operations in the West Bank, amid accusations he is using the images for election campaigning.

A billboard for the more left-wing of the parties running for office was vandalised in recent days with calls for the murder of party leader Yair Golan scrawled across it, according to the newspaper Haaretz.

Among the messages written on the sign was: "Despicable killer of Jews, wanted dead or alive."

Concerns about Netanyahu

Netanyahu himself is the main issue in the campaign.

Like many really long-serving political leaders, there is a sense that he is campaigning by just pulling the same string, even though it doesn't really work anymore.

Very few polls suggest Netanyahu is going to win.

Most predict a bigger vote for parties standing against Netanyahu's Likud, but not a large enough one to create a majority.

Israelis who want to see Netanyahu gone — because of the corruption allegations against him; because of the security failures before October 7; because they believe he actually represents a threat to Israel remaining a democracy — still talk hopefully of an election boilover.

But whatever the actual numbers of seats held in the Israeli Parliament, the Knesset, after Tuesday, Netanyahu is expected to stay on as a caretaker prime minister for the foreseeable future.

That is seen as posing its own risks, both domestically and abroad.

In the short term, the concern is that, at home, Netanyahu and his ultra-right colleagues will accelerate their attempts to change Israel's legal system, and towards full annexation of the West Bank. And abroad, there are fears Netanyahu will renew hostilities with Iran with the aim of establishing wartime conditions that would allow him to stay on in office, irrespective of the election outcome.

All the signs show that Netanyahu is much more driven and steady in his determination to recommence hostilities with Iran than is the US president.

The New York Times reported this week that Israel and the United States came close to striking Iran early this month, but Mr Trump again decided at the last minute to postpone the attack.

Trump has declared there will be no attacks before the US mid-term elections on November 2. Apart from the politics involved in such a call — when the war is deeply, deeply unpopular in the US — it reflects the fact that the American military build-up in the region is not expected to be ready until that time.

The question now has to be whether the sheer desperation and determination of Benjamin Netanyahu means he may be prepared to risk stoking regional conflict on a range of fronts, irrespective of the vacillating decisions of the United States President.

Laura Tingle is reporting from Jerusalem as the ABC's Global Affairs Editor.